


In Loving Memory

by Valaks



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Alternate Universe Memories Can be Captured and Sold, Angst and Fluff, Angstober, But Wishes he Didn’t, Gen, Happy Memories, Jack Starbright Misses Alex, Just a Little Something to Remember Me By, Medium Angst, Yassen Gregorovich Has a Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27024610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valaks/pseuds/Valaks
Summary: Yassen set the memory orb back down. He was not one to collect such things. He had seen enough in his life that he didn’t need to live through the memories and experiences of others. To feel their pain, and see their realities. But viewing Alex Rider’s hurt and compassion and mourning laid bare as he watched a man die changed things. Alex has obviously been captured, Yassen needed to find him.OrHow could the Organ Hospital get any worse
Relationships: Alex Rider & Jack Starbright, Yassen Gregorovich & Alex Rider
Comments: 13
Kudos: 80
Collections: AR Angstober 2020





	In Loving Memory

Yassen set the memory orb back down. He was not one to collect such things. He had seen enough in his life that he didn’t need to live through the memories and experiences of others. To feel their pain, and see their realities. His very profession had him drifting from the heights of society to the very lows. But after viewing the memory he knew exactly why it had been given to him. 

It was razor sharp recollection which meant it had been taken fresh and fully extracted from the mind, no chance at retrieval and with how crisp it had been the possibility for brain damage was high. He had done enough memory imprints in the field to know the signs had left grown men, powerful men drooling over themselves to send a message, drained them dry for his employer to sort through and see what they felt to be important. 

But this….this was different. 

A boutique memory. 

Crisp and perfect. Made for sale. And Alex Rider’s memories would not be willingly on the market for sale no matter how hard of times he had fallen on since Ian Rider’s death. MI6 would have paid for the silence. Not as much as his memories were worth - Alex’s life as a spy would be full of mystery and intrigue and fear and drama to the rich elite who were interested in such things. They would also be blackmail which was why Yassen had this one of a small boy kneeling on the aisle of a plane with a dying man feelings of hurt, and confusion, and desperation and something undeniably warm like love tinging the memory bright and painful. He had because it would reveal the truth of his death. A trained agent could analyze it and see the tell tale signs of a fake but 14 year old Alex Rider high on adrenaline and fear hadn’t and had  _ mourned _ . 

If Alex clearly hadn’t already been captured this would have been enough to make him a target. He should destroy it. It was an attachment but….he cast his eyes back to it.

Maybe it was best to ensure there were no others out there. 

He tapped every contact to trace the source stopped in dingy cellars of dealers, and polished hallways of buyers. Each one leading him hopefully closer to the “Rider memories” that had taken the underworld by storm. He bartered for them. Depending on what state he found Alex in he could possibly be rehabilitated by being exposed to them. Yassen wasn’t sure when that became a priority. Maybe around the third time he heard someone preen over what a ‘ _ fascinating _ life this child had lived’.

It took two weeks to trace the trail back to a rainforest in Australia and, unfortunately, right into the hands of one of his old handlers who was  _ very _ interested to know about the person chasing after Alex Rider. Yu was an….unpleasant man. Yassen hadn’t enjoyed speaking to him even as a subordinate in SCORPIA. Physically Yassen could snap his neck with barely a twist of the wrist but Yu was powerful in other ways that were far more deadly and dangerous than anything Yassen dealt in. 

This hospital was an example of that. He had heard of it as an operative. A whispered threat of where failures disappeared to. Yassen had seen enough depraved things to know it was real but seeing it and the rows of beds of brain dead bodies that were, in reality, corpses already was unnerving even to him. A human flesh factory. And Alex was here. He should have stopped his search the moment he found out he was with Yu but he had to try. The very parts that Yu extracted could be bought to rebuild. There was just the question of how much damage had been done. 

He wasn’t sure what he expected to see when he laid eyes on Alex. He certainly expected to be led to a bed with him blissed out on whatever was pumped through the IVs covered in gauze like so many he passed. But instead found himself in another building…smoke pouring out a chimney, fine ash raining down. 

Alex’s body had been pried from a neat stack and laid on a table. His skin was tinged yellow, limbs boneless and pockmarked from needles, tendons and marrow extracted. Every usable part gone. Picked over like the carcass he now was. Yassen didn’t say anything. Just closed his eyes, picturing the last time he had seen him on Air Force One, now overlaid with the feelings from the memory orb and made all the more alive and aching for it. 

He couldn’t bring himself to look back down again. He just nodded to the cremator and walked back out. 

  
  


Jack Starbright visited the Rider plot in the cemetery one last time before she returned to America. She had waited six months. The first month had been spent in her normal worrying and fretting. Keeping everything arranged and prepped for when he got back - his med kit, favorite foods, a stack of movies (non violent, no horror) for them to watch, but he never came stumbling back through the door. It took pitching a fit in the lobby of the Royal and General to get details. MIA. Partner confirmed lost. Enemy hands. Three months later he had been upgraded to KIA. They didn’t have a body but they were certain and they wouldn’t tell her why. Maybe she didn’t want to know. Another fit had gotten a funeral but more importantly an upturned patch of dirt for her to cry over. A gravestone lean against as the sobs shook her, letters to trace when they wound down enough to that she could, with hiccuping breaths tell him all the things he had missed all the cooking she had burned and the movies she had tried to watch and all the tissues she had spent  _ you’re terrible for the environment, Alex, I’ve spent a forest on you and if you were here you would tell me that was an awful joke. But it’s what you deserve.  _

There were never any flowers or other visitors, not really. She was bitter, but she understood it. Alex had drifted away from his classmates because of MI6, Tom had enough going on in his life without focusing on his dead friend, even his best friend. He was young. He couldn’t be blamed. MI6 could though. They never visited because, just like Ian, they had only cared about him when he was useful. A simple lily spray after the funeral had been the only indication that anyone had cared.

Until now. 

Next to the headstone was a marble box and on top of it a memory orb. She sank shakily to her knees next to it. At first touching the box reverently and then clutching it tightly to her chest. She wouldn’t be able to hold Alex again. She had known that for months now but to have it confirmed…..She didn’t know how long she spent kneeling there long enough for the London rain to come and soak her through and then leave again. But once she had finally come back to herself she turned her attention to the orb. She had heard of them. They made great rom com fodder but she had never seen one in person. That it was with Alex….she took a deep breath and picked it up. Pressing the button flush on the bottom against the pearly surface and her world lit up in color as a mop of blonde hair bounded down the hall with tinkling laughter and threw his arms around a red headed woman, filled with warmth and love that the the child in the box of ashes at her feet would never feel again. 


End file.
